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August 05, 2015
Coal: Still standing. Barely.
In the Saturday, August 1 Washington Post,"New EPA rule on greenhouse gases the latest blow to King Coal". Excerpts:
When coal was king, it fueled more than half of the nation’s electricity. It fired up American industry and powered an ever-growing variety of household appliances and electronics. And American presidential hopefuls paid homage to coal, courting mine owners and miners whose unionized ranks once numbered more than 400,000.
All of that has changed. On Monday, the Obama administration takes on the coal industry with the final version of rules it has dubbed the Clean Power Plan, a complex scheme designed to reduce, on a state-by-state basis, the amount of greenhouse gases the nation’s electric power sector emits. The main target: coal.
Today, more people in the United States work jobs installing solar panels than work in the coal industry. Ideas for using liquefied coal for cars never materialized. Industrial users have become more efficient. And coal’s share of electricity generation is waning, with natural gas and renewable energy taking its place. Only a handful of coal power plants have been built in recent years, and the Sierra Club keeps a tally of canceled coal-fired power plants like trophies on the wall.
The reason for the focus on coal is that it remains the largest U.S. producer of greenhouse gases at a time when President Obama is striving for an agreement at the December climate summit in Paris. In March, the United States submitted its own goal to the United Nations, vowing to reduce by 2025 U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels. Trimming coal emissions must be a part of that.
"Early Coal Mining, Williams River, West Virginia, 1930s" by Finley Taylor.
Posted by JD Hull at August 5, 2015 05:03 PM
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